Maddux, Glavine, Thomas elected to Baseball Hall of Fame; Biggio just misses

Again, I think this reputation has a lot to do with it:

Griffey is one of those guys that everything that he did was pretty much natural. He didn’t work out. He didn’t lift a lot or (watch) video or anything. (Quote from Carlos Gonzalez. I know I've read others. This was the first I could find.)

If a guy doesn't work out, he doesn't have a reason to use steroids.

 

Not much more to add to that.

 

Sean Livingston becomes at least the fourth writer to say he would have had Biggio except for limits. I've got to imagine there's no harm in taking a vote to get that number pushed to 15.

Jayson Stark says the BBWAA will post a certain number of ballots on Friday.

 

Rob Maadi said the same thing, though he may have been one of the four you are counting.

If they do get rid of the 10-vote limit, maybe just do it for 5 or 10 years. If you have it permanently, and guys can vote for 15 or 20 (or whatever), you might have a lot of undeserving selections (like maybe Morris this year).

It might be a better idea to get rid of the 5 percent minimum, or extend the time of the ballot to 20 years rather than 15.

 

You like to take them at their word but the flip side is that it sounds like a convenient fall-back excuse.

Oh, yeah, like, I *SWEAR* I would have voted him in if it wasn't for that pesky 10-man rule.

 

Reading that, it strikes me that if Biggio can't make the 10 on those ballots, he's probably not a solid Hall candidate for those voters.

That's not to say that Biggio doesn't belong.

 

Found this interesting:

But baseball writers were still running into the same stonewalling. "After I asked Bagwell two or three times, what else can you do?" Justice said. "Even when I see him now and he's 110 pounds."

Justice apparently does hold a scale but isn't blind after all.

 

Silverman is the only one documented so far before the vote.

Well then there's this for Biggio — there are at least five voters, besides Blum who voted for Biggio in 2013 but didn't keep him in 2014, despite having spots open on the ballot —— Hal Bodley, Steven Marcus, Terrance Moore, Mark Purdy, and Tom Singer.

 

First of all, I think Bagwell did PEDs.

But, that being said, the notion that someone is smaller, six years later, is a non-starter to me. I've heard it trotted out before. Guy stops playing, guy stops lifting weights, guy gets smaller. That would happen with PEDs or without. I lift weights. I would lose what little muscle mass I have pretty rapidly if I stopped, and I've never even seen a PED.

 

Not bad.

 

Batman, that's a false equivalency. I find it very suspicious that a guy who came into the majors as a skinny, bona fide 5-tool wonderkid would, by the time he hit his career peak, grow noticeably larger and become primarily a home run hitter who suffered multiple muscle injuries that cost him significant playing time during an era in which steroids were, if not rampant, certainly not uncommon. If that's not a duck, it certainly looks like one and quacks like one.

Personally, I'd still vote him for the HOF. Of course, I'd vote for Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, McGwire and Palmeiro too, because those guys and Griffey were among the best baseball players on the planet during their prime, and I'm not the morality police, and I don't know who else was or was not using PEDs.

But if suspicions will prevent some people from voting, Griffey seems just as suspicious as anyone else to me. I'll grant you that his name hasn't come up in any of the big investigations, but we can't possibly know every possible source for every possible steroid. He could have obtained them from somewhere.

 

Suspicions are opinions, opinions are valid. I get all that.

It just seems like it's getting easier and easier to let suspicions hold up as fact. Without in-your-hands fact.